322 HEALTH. [1817. 



inferior one, however able. Pennington was led away 

 by one instance ; Baillie relied on his general expe- 

 rience. I have known other cases in which he pro- 

 nounced the most confident opinion against prac- 

 titioners who confined themselves to. one class of 

 diseases, and in that class supreme, and yielded to by 

 all others, and in which Baillic's holding out against 

 them was reckoned extreme presumption. 



But of all Baillie's guesses, as he used to call his 

 carefully-formed opinions, the most remarkable was in 

 the case of Horner, as was proved after his death in 

 February 1817. He had been ill for some years, and 

 many physicians, both in London and Edinburgh, and 

 in Paris also, had been consulted, and from all their 

 opinions Baillie at once and very confidently differed. 

 When he came to propose his own, he confessed the 

 extreme uncertainty in which so obscure and difficult 

 a case had left him, after repeated examination of all 

 the symptoms. However, he conjectured that it was 

 one or other of two diseases, so rare that he had only 

 seen a case or two of the one, and of the other he had 

 only one example in his museum of morbid anatomy ; 

 and he said that unhappily there was no cure for 

 either. When Vacca at Pisa (where Horner died) 

 opened the body, it was found that both the diseases 

 existed. I think the one was an enlargement of the 

 air-holes of the lungs, the other an hepatisation that 

 is, their conversion into a liver-like substance.'" 



Mackintosh used to say that this melancholy case 

 reminded him of the ludicrous one in ' Don Quixote/ 

 of Sancho's uncle having such skill in flavours as to 

 be able to conjecture that the wine in a cask tasted of 



* See Leonard Homer's ' Life of Francis Ilorner,' vol. ii. p. 381, 434. 



